How to Forward Requests to another Controller

Though not very common, you can also forward to another controller internally with the forward() method provided by the Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController class.

Instead of redirecting the user’s browser, this makes an “internal” sub-request and calls the defined controller. The forward() method returns the Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response object that is returned from that controller:

public function index($name)
{
    $response = $this->forward('App\Controller\OtherController::fancy', [
        'name'  => $name,
        'color' => 'green',
    ]);

    // ... further modify the response or return it directly

    return $response;
}

The array passed to the method becomes the arguments for the resulting controller. The target controller method might look something like this:

public function fancy($name, $color)
{
    // ... create and return a Response object
}

Like when creating a controller for a route, the order of the arguments of the fancy() method doesn’t matter: the matching is done by name.